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A team of 20 volunteers spent hundreds of hours running his DNA through a genealogy database in the hope they could discover close genetic matches. The team was eventually able to narrow down the location of his family to Almeda County, California.

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“In the end, all the DNA matches and all the family trees and all the research paid off. This took persistence, good solid genealogy and detective work”, a Facebook post by the organisation said.

Users of Redddit were instrumental in solving the case. 4,000 of their members scoured web groups in the hope that they would be able to trigger the memories of at least one person who could help.

It was also those members who first notified DNA Doe Project about Stevik.

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Sadly, the real name of Stevik will not be released to the public out of respect to the privacy of his grieving family. His relatives had assumed that he was still alive and had been avoiding them for decades until they were informed of his death.

The dead man was also not from a Middle Eastern background but was in fact a mix of Hispanic and native American.